1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to social networking, and more particularly, to generating personalized social updates that are more relevant to a user based on explicit and implied user interests.
2. Description of the Related Art
Social networking has grown tremendously in recent years. With the meteoric rise in popularity of various social networking sites, there is an increased competition amongst these social networking sites to attract, engage and retain users. Some of the ways these social networks have been trying to lure users include providing various degrees of freedom to customize users' homepage or profile information, providing notifications in a timely fashion, etc. The notifications are provided as offline updates to the users on various events that the user prefers. The user provides explicit instructions on which events he needs notification and the mode of notification, and the sites provide updates to these events in a timely fashion complying to these requirements. Often these offline updates are provided as email notifications and follow certain pre-defined patterns. For instance, the notifications are provided as periodic digests, if the user requested for one, wherein the updates are arranged in a chronological order of particular events or selected contact list. When a user has an expansive friend circle, this form of notification can become overwhelming as the user has to sift through the entire digest in order to be informed of various events and status associated with all the friends.
The existing offline updates have certain drawbacks. One drawback is that the notifications do not take the user's interest into consideration when providing updates. As a result, the notifications may deliver activities/events of low relevance to a user at the same level of importance as high relevance activities/events making such updates less interesting and less appealing to users. This might lead to opting out of such updates and low to non-existent interest in the social network site itself, defeating the very purpose of the updates. Another drawback of notifications is that the notifications do not consider content relevance when providing the updates.
All of these drawbacks result in lowering users interest and subsequent dropping out from such social network sites. It is therefore essential to retain and improve user engagement in the social network in order to enhance user traffic to the site subsequently improving monetization.
It is in this context that the embodiments of the invention arise.